The ANGELINA Videogame Design System—Part I

Abstract

Automatically generating content for videogames has long been a staple of game development and the focus of much successful research. Such forays into content generation usually concern themselves with producing a specific game component, such as a level design. This has proven a rich and challenging area of research, but in focusing on creating separate parts of a larger game, we miss out on the most challenging and interesting aspects of game development. By expanding our scope to the automated design of entire games, we can investigate the relationship between the different creative tasks undertaken in game development, tackle the higher level creative challenges of game design, and ultimately build systems capable of much greater novelty, surprise, and quality in their output. This paper, the first in a series of two, describes two case studies in automating game design, proposing cooperative coevolution as a useful technique to use within systems that automate this process. We show how this technique allows essentially separate content generators to produce content that complements each other. We also describe systems that have used this to design games with subtle emergent effects. After introducing the technique and its technical basis in this paper, in the second paper in the series we discuss higher level issues in automated game design, such as potential overlap with computational creativity and the issue of evaluation.